Metamorphoses of Insects, 261 



gence? After the first doubt of its truth were dispelled, what 

 astonishment would succeed ! Amongst the learned, what 

 surmises ! — what investigations ! Amongst the vulgar, what 

 eager curiosity and amazement ! All would be interested in the 

 history of such an unheard-of phenomenon ; even the most torpid 

 would flock to the sight of such a prodigy. 



But, you ask, " To what do all these improbable suppositions 

 tend ?" Simply to rouse your attention to the metamoriihoses of 

 the insect world, almost as strange and surprising, to which I am 

 now about to direct your view, — miracles which, though scarcely 

 surpassed in singularity by all that poets have feigned, and 

 though actually wrought every day beneath our eyes, are, because 

 of their commonness, and the minuteness of the objects, unheeded 

 alike by the ignorant and the learned. 



The butterfly which amuses you with his aerial excursions, one 

 while extracting nectar from the tube of the honeysuckle, and then 

 the very image of fickleness, flying to a rose as if to contrast the 

 hue of its wings with that of the flower on which it reposes, did 

 not come into the world as you now behold it. At its first 

 exclusion from the egg^ and for some months of its existence 

 afterwards, it was a worm-like caterpillar, crawling upon sixteen 

 short legs, greedily devouring leaves with two jaws, and seeing 

 by means of twelve eyes so minute as to be nearly imperceptible 

 without the aid of a microscope. You now view it furnished 

 with wings capable of rapid and extensive flights ; of its sixteen 

 feet ten have disappeared, and the remaining six are in most 

 respects wholly unlike those to which they have succeeded ; its 

 jaws have vanished, and are replaced by a curled-up proboscis 

 suited only for sipping liquid sweets; the form of its head is 

 entirely changed, — two long horns project from its upper suiface ; 

 and instead of twelve invisible eyes, you behold two very large, 

 and composed of at least seventeen thousand convex lenses, each 

 supposed to be a distinct and e9"ective eye ! 



Were you to push your examination further, and by dissection 

 to compare the internal conformation of the caterpillar with that 

 of the butterfly, you would witness changes even more 

 extraordinary. In the former you would find some thousands of 

 muscles, which in the latter are replaced by others of a form and 

 structure entirely dilFerent. JS'early the whole body of the cater- 

 pillar is occupied by a capacious stomach. In the butterfly it 

 has become converted into an almost imperceptible thread-like 



